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Is this all just semantics? Are all of these people really saying the same thing and have they been saying the same thing ever since 2010? Cyrus Shepherd shed a little light on things in this post when he said that it seemed people were confusing links and 301-redirects and viewing them as being the same things, when they really aren't. He wrote "here's a huge difference between redirecting a page and linking to a page." I think he is the only writer who is getting down to the heart of the matter. But I'm still in a fog.

In this video from April, 2011, Matt Cutts states very clearly that "There is a little bit of pagerank that doesn't pass through a 301-redirect." continuing on to say that if this wasn't the case, then there would be a temptation to 301-redirect from one page to another instead of just linking.

Now for the "myth" part. Apparently the "myth" was about how much pagerank dissipates via a 301-redirect versus a link.

Here's where my head starts to hurt:

Does this mean that when Page A links to Page B it looks like this:

A -----> ( reduces pagerank by about 15%)-------> B (inherits about 85% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page

But say the "link" that exists on Page A is no longer good, but it's still the original URL, which, when clicked, now redirects to Page B via a URL rewrite (301 redirect)....based on what Matt Cutts said, does the pagerank scenario now look like this:

A (with an old URL to Page B) ----- ( reduces pagerank by about 15%) -------> URL rewrite (301 redirect) - Reduces pagerank by another 15% --------> B (inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page)

Forgive me, I'm not a mathematician, so not sure if that 72% is right?

It seems to me, from what Matt is saying, the only way to avoid this scenario would be to make sure that Page A was updated with the new URL, thereby avoiding the 301 rewrite?

I recently had to re-write 18 product page URLs on a site and do 301 redirects. This was brought about by our hosting company initiating rules in the back end that broke all of our custom URLs. The redirects were to exactly the same product pages (so, highly relevant). PageRank tanked on all 18 of them, hard. Perhaps this is why I am diving into this question more deeply.

4 Responses

In your second example above, the link would still pass 85% pagerank not 72%. Obviously, in order for a 301 to pass pagerank, it needs to be used in a link. If a 301 link only passed 72% pagerank, then it would always pass less pagerank than a regular link, which would contradict what Matt said.

When you say "inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page", I think that's where your understanding goes off track....either that, or it's where mine goes off track, because my understanding is that the percentage of PR that is passed from one page to another page is based on an unknown "X amount", not on the linking page's toolbar pagerank. I think is better to say ...inherits about 72% of the pagerank that page A is able to pass...---not 72% of Page A's pagrerank. Does that make sense?

Now I've got an extra step. Does this mean that the page rank that Page 3 inherits is affected by both the link and then the 301? Does the page rank dissipation happen twice?

If, say 50% (not real numbers!) of page rank value is lost for each link/301, then the original link to the 301 would lose %50 and the 301 would lose the same, (50% of the 50%) which means that page 3 get's just 25%

What if I end up in the horrible situation of having

3. Page 1 -[link to]-> 301 -> 301 -> 301 -> Page 3

Does page rank decay happen on every redirect?

Personally, I've only used redirects where necessary and, where I can, I've tried to get inbound links updated to point to the correct page.

Yes Doug, you totally get my confusion. Your scenarios describe more clearly exactly what I am wondering. In the case of your third example, Matt even stated pretty clearly in the video (perhaps even both videos) that chains of redirects can be a problem.

I totally agree with you that avoiding redirects altogether and updating the links is the way to go. Even Google's own Pagespeed Insight's tool often makes this recommendation when evaluating pagespeed of a site. If 301's are exactly the same as links, why would the tool recommend avoiding them?

Yes, I think perhaps Matt said what he did because he was looking at 301s and links in complete isolation. If so, then what he says is believable in theory, but I can't think of how it would actually happen in practice.

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